Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Friday, October 31, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XVIII After I wrote about how we at our house are waiting around helplessly for the hammer of a ladybug infestation to fall, the e-mails proliferated like…well, like ladybugs. Jillian wanted to know more. Or she thought she did: Wow, that's pretty creepy...here in Rockville, Maryland (about an hour or so outside of D.C.) it appears we're also being stalked by these adorable insects. On two non-consecutive days last week, there were at least 2-6 ladybugs on almost every window in the house. We found several of them inside the house for days after. I saw more ladybugs in one of those days than I've seen in my entire life! Do you know if it's a national ladybug over-population, or if the two instances are just weird coincidences? Whatever the reason; freaky. I did notice the gold bugs, but we had a lot of the normal red ones too, if that helps at all. Just curious. Turn back, Jillian! Before it’s too late! Move to someplace where the bugs aren’t so hostile! Like maybe Borneo. There is no good news for us. Signman says (no pun intended): My parents had a similar encounter in Dahlonega, GA a few years ago. There is a local college (North Georgia College and University) that did an experiment with breeding and creating hybrid ladybugs and the experiment quickly got WAY out of hand and the town became ridden with ladybugs. Anytime I would visit them for about a year or so I would see them all over their house. You get in the shower, LADYBUGS! You go to sleep and feel something LAND ON YOUR FACE!!!! LADYBUGS! So, I feel your pain, and I know my parents do too. They don’t have the problem anymore, but my parents had their house exterminated and most of the town had to as well. So...who you gonna call? Ladybugbusters! That’s great. There’s a Stephen King story in there somewhere. Ill-advised experiments on nature that go awry and wreak havoc on the general population are one of his favorite themes. And he can do for ladybugs what It did for clowns. Meanwhile, Holly Golightly has this to say: Oh dear. I've been the victim of a ladybug infestation more than once. It's true that they're not hostile, but unfortunately, it's also true that they're incredibly stupid. They'll circle the room drunkenly for hours, smacking themselves against the ceiling, light bulbs and pretty much any other object, making an annoying thwacky ding every single time their shells connect. I know that noise. I hear it IN MY DREAMS. You will have to start squishing them. They emit a funny smell when this happens. Oh, joy. People will start looking at you like some sort of bug Nazi when you tell them that you've been killing ladybugs. Even better. But don't fear. It's for the good of your family and for any chance at peace and quiet (that being the kind without thwacky dingy noises as you sit at your computer or try to sleep). Maybe I could record that thwacky dingy noise and broadcast it from the speakers on an ice cream truck and use it to lure the ladybugs…oh, why bother? Sarah has even more good news: My friend, welcome to the wonderful world of Japanese Lady Beetles. They've become quite a problem down here in Ohio. I didn't think they could make it in Minnesota. What's the point of surviving Minnesota winters if you still have to deal with bugs? That’s an excellent question. Got a spare bedroom? You can read more about the evil little pests here. Quit trying to make me blog. Now, the good folks at OSU suggest that you don't use chemicals to kill them. Well, you know, yea them. Any bug killing chemical with "(blank)methrin" will work pretty good at getting rid of them. We use a hose attachment one to get to the upper reaches of the house, and a spray bottle inside. You gotta be sure to get the entry points to your house. If you are worried about toxic chemicals in your house, you can vacuum the bugs up once they get into your house (and they will get into your house), but the sound of the vacuum cleaner scares them so they shoot out this yellow stuff that stains ceilings, walls, curtains, etc and has a lovely smell. The cats say, “Oh, great. More messes they can blame us for.” And, again contrary to OSU, the little buggers do bite. The fact that they do it out of curiosity instead of maliciousness does not mean it hurts any less. Thanks. That’s swell. I’ll be looking forward to that. And speaking of bugs, Caenis has alerted me to a technical problem: So of course I've been reading your blog for forever, but over the last week or so I've noticed that you seem to be much more introspective. Every statement has become a question. Every paragraph a seeking for knowledge. I mean, the amount of thought put into the query "So if I were to fall off the ladder?sorry, experience some kind of "catastrophic ladder failure??nobody would be around to take me to the hospital" threatens to set me on a path of questioning everything around me. Ok, seriously, when your lovely, wonderful page is viewed with Mozilla (so, also probably Netscape, though I don't know for sure), all of your quotation marks become question marks. This is not a problem that you've had all along, but only something I've seen in the last couple of weeks. Oh, I’ve just been experimenting with uptalking? You know, when every sentence you utter rises in pitch at the end? And it gets really irritating in a hurry? Seriously, I’m pretty sure this has something to do with my entries being typed on a more recent version of Microsoft Word. It has “smart quotes,” you know. Of course, when Microsoft calls one of their features “smart,” they generally mean “guaranteed to piss you off.” Software is never more annoying that when it thinks it’s smarter than me. Of course, I could just turn off the smart quotes, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. On the plus side, I was glad to learn I’m not the only one who drives a bottle of wine around in my car for no reason. There’s also JAdamson: So what you're saying is, I should take the bottle of white wine out of the car. I think the poor thing is a refugee from a bachelorette party back in April. And I think it's still there because I keep telling myself that it has been heated and cooled so many times that it can't possibly be drinkable anymore, so there's no use taking it inside the house. Irrational people may assume that the next logical step would be to throw it away. They would be wrong. It's an expensive bottle of wine, and I feel that its presence in my back seat makes me appear suave and cosmopolitan; nestled in the corner with that Krispy Kreme box, it says about me, "I am witty and urbane, yet not a snob." Also, it says "I am very lazy." But I don't listen to it when it says that. Couldn’t have said it better myself. But beware, lest Mandy’s tragedy befall you: Ugh--winery car!! We had that for a time this summer in our '89 Civic. My husband does avant-garde jazz/improvised music concert promotion here in Austin, and that genre being such a small music scene he does all of the hospitality himself. (Along with everything else associated with said concert promotion. This is a barely-breaking-even "hobby" of his; he's a librarian by day.) Anyway, he forgot about a bottle of red wine in the trunk of the car, unopened from the last concert he did a few months ago, until I noticed a very pungent, winey odor on his clothes when he would get home from work. I thought maybe the library had driven him to drink. But no. After digging through the mounds of junk, papers, old shoes (?), etc. in the trunk he found the wine bottle, sans cork. Sans wine. It's hot in Austin in the summer, as you know, and the old Civic's air conditioning just doesn't work adequately, so the car was a big, hot stinkfest of eye-watering sour grape fumes for a while. Yee haw! We just had to pull the liner out of the trunk and hose it down and let it air dry, several days in a row. So what happened to me could have been worse. It could have been red wine instead of white. It could have been a Texas summer instead of a Minnesota one. And I could have been mistaken by my wife for an alcoholic. I’m counting my blessings. Today’s best search phrase: “Allergies blogging sneezing machine gun.” Great. Now everybody’s going to want one. posted by M. Giant 3:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, October 30, 2003 Junk Mail Slot, Episode I My spam has been a little surreal the past month. For instance, this from some webmaster somewhere, presumably where they don’t have English as the primary language: Dear Portal Administration! Excuse me, have we met? I like to get to know a person before I let them call me Portal Administration. I have recently come across your site and liked it very much. Oh, thank you. My friends just call me PortAdmin. I suppose that the visitors of our resources belong to the same social group and my site could be useful for your audience so I suggest to exchange our links. This will help both of us to increase Link-Popularity and accordingly get top positions in many searching system, Google for instance. Sounds good to me. This whole Damn Hell Ass Kings thing has worked out splendidly for me, so I’m open. My site is dedicated to guns. Oh, yeah. Mine too. All guns, all the time, that’s my motto. There’s no funny without firearms. Seriously, though, what does this person know about my site’s visitors that I don’t? Y’all aren’t shooting each other out there, are you? That might help to explain the frequent craters in my traffic stats. I hope that our subject as well as your site info will evoke mutual interest of our visitors. If you are positive to cooperate with me will you please visit this page to leave your link: [link excluded] And if not, you’ll come and shoot me? Actually, even if I’m not about to trade links with an online gun nut, I can appreciate his way with words. And after you read this e-mail, so will you: Hello love Scribblerx! Hold on. Did I say you could call me love Scribblerx? And by the way, do you have a gun? I'm fully confident you have nuisances with permission to [random porn link excluded]? Wow, it’s true. Confidence is sexy. Especially as it relates to nuisances with permission. Test this correct page for access: [similar random porn link excluded] Now that’s confidence. They figure that the only reason I haven’t visited their porn site is because I had the wrong link the whole time. Here I am, with no way to get porn, what with there being no porn at all anywhere else on the Internet, and they come to my rescue with their little BabelFished e-mail. And finally, the bonus: P.S. Today all is Extremely Free for you Scribblerx! Truly yours, great supporter. Superb hurried international windfall from Erica or your friend and comrade Den Wlliamson. To remove from this first-class rapid overall tips, send any email at 100% Free here love Scribblerx: [e-mail address excluded] I’m not referring to the Extremely Free-ness when I’m talking about the bonus. I’m talking about the language. Writing like that isn’t easy to find. Or so I thought, until this came over the transom a couple of days later: Dwarfs black does white soccer moms sweet little things. All varieties of strange and wacky exhibitions for you the insightful art admirer.New material daily is our mantra.Bits of this are quite possibly outlawed in your town.Remember we warned you:)We hope you like what you see and look forward welcome you our members-only site. My only question is, what kind of translation software gets the phrase “insightful art admirer” from the word “porndog?” Okay, that’s not my only question. My other question is, why is the entire text of the e-mail a hyperlink? Finish being appraised of our info. I’m finished, thanks. Couldn’t eat another bite. Any feedback please don't wait to let me know. Thank you, [Name and e-mail address excluded] No, [Name excluded], thank you. Also, super karate monkey death car. Today’s best search phrase” “’I dig your mom’ + t-shirt.” I don’t have such a T-shirt, but I kind of wish I did. It belongs to my friend Chao. I do, however, have a T-shirt that says “Mullet-Free Since ’93,” which came from Chao. If you spotted me in it at JournalCon and were overcome with desire (for the shirt, pervs), click on the link marked AUH7 in my “links” section and get your own. From Chao, of course. posted by M. Giant 5:46 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, October 29, 2003 Blogger for a Day Not to get all meta on you here—after all, I’m not a big fan of sites that write mainly about the site—but I was having kind of an identity crisis about this site up until a couple of weeks before JournalCon. Is it a blog? Is it a journal? On the one hand, it’s got that big orange B on it and the word “blog” right there in the URL. On the other hand, if it’s a blog, why is it so damn long-winded? So then when the JournalCon committee (rock stars, every last one of them) asked me to be on the panel entitled “RAW is WAR: Blogs vs. Journals,” I jumped at the chance. If nothing else, several dozen people would be on hand to answer my question for me. I looked into printing up ballots to pass around and everything. Luckily for them, it didn’t come to that. I finally resolved the question by deciding that Velcrometer is a journal trapped in the body of a blog. And nobody has seen fit to disagree with me. As Ryan pointed out at the panel, “You are not your URL.” Which also makes me feel better about not having gotten around to registering www.thecoolestguyintheworld.com yet. So I’m not calling this a blog any more. I don’t have any snooty reasons for it, and I’m not sensitive about it, and you can call it whatever you want and I won’t correct you, but I’m done calling myself a blogger. I don’t have the energy for that kind of activity. Having that all squared away, I’m going to now do the only sensible thing and see if I can blog for a day. Gotta have some confusion around here, after all. If nothing else, it proves that blogging is work too. Unless I’m the one doing it, in which case it may simply be screwing around. * * * There’s this new show called Joe Average, in which a hot babe hooks up with some shlubby guy. Like I don’t already get that at home. The login page at Hotmail was telling me “Movie villain Jack Elam dies” every day for about a week. How many times does the poor bastard have to kick, anyway? Was his last role Rasputin or something? My boss made The Morning News last week. Scroll down to “Scene 8.” I was there that day, and I can tell you it wasn’t pretty. Link via CorpKitten. Anybody know anything about Charlottesville, Virginia that I can’t learn on the Internet? Help me out. Not that there’s anything in it for you. I still owe B. Diddy a mouse pad, that’s how lazy I am. My fortune cookie today says: “Boys will be boys. So will a lot of middle-aged men.” * * * Dude, this is hard. I’m stopping now. In the next entry, we’ll be returning to our regularly scheduled program of making shit up. Today’s best search phrase There’s been a disturbing theme emerging the past few days: “Ty Pennington smoking.” “Amy Wynn nipple.” “Paige Davis naked.” “Paige Davis accident.” Combined, these searches carry some kind of message, but I can’t seem to divine what it might be. posted by M. Giant 4:46 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, October 28, 2003 Fly Away Home. Please A couple of months ago, I was working on my computer at home when, above and behind me, I heard the sound of a large insect repeatedly racking itself on the light fixture. Looking up, I saw a golden blur assiduously pursuing its own immolation against the glowing filament. As bugs do. Trash is allergic to bee stings. It’s what kept her out of the Navy, a task that her better judgment alone should have been more than equal to, but there you are. She’s been stung once in her life, when she was very young, and it nearly killed her. If it happens again, she’ll likely go into anaphylactic shock, lose consciousness, and, best-case scenario, eventually end up in a row of tanks somewhere under an Antarctic ice shelf. She wasn’t in the room at the time that I noticed this particular specimen. So I got up, closed the door to trap it inside with me, and rolled up a magazine to enforce our house’s zero-tolerance policy on bees. With extreme prejudice. After I spent a minute or so trying to get a clear shot at the flitting beastie, it finally alighted (see what I did there?) and morphed from a angrily hyperkinetic blur into a cute little ladybug. A cute, orange-ish ladybug. Ladybugs are our friends. Even my wife, who hates bugs, likes ladybugs. I opened the door to my study and left it alone. Some days later, I was up on the ladder painting the trim on the front of our house. I’d never seen ladybugs swarm, per se, and I still can’t honestly say that I have. One ladybug per square foot on the upper panel of our house is not a swarm. It is a lot, though. So I can say that I’ve seen ladybugs lotting. Then one day on the way home from work, I was listening to MPR and they were talking about how the ladybug population of the state was spiking as summer ended. But apparently these aren’t your garden-variety ladybugs. They’re some kind of specialized Cambodianized or Chileanized or Madagascaranized ladybugs that were brought to America years ago to control the aphid population. And it worked. They did their jobs. Now the only question is apparently whether they’ll have enough aphids left to go around. There are two ways to identify these special ladybugs. One is that they have nineteen spots on their carapaces. Considering that I mistook one of them for a bee, I don’t think much of my chances of being able to count nineteen spots on one, even if it holds still. An easier giveaway is that they have an M-shaped marking on the tops of their heads. And also lots and lots of friends. The entomologist on the radio explained that these ladybugs aren’t hostile, and if they bite you at all it’s only because they’re incredibly stupid. But he did say that they may soon be present in sufficient numbers to be a nuisance. And that with the weather getting cooler, they’re going to be more and more interested in getting inside our houses. And that the ladybugs in our houses next spring will be the ones—and the progeny of the ones—that got inside this fall. Okay, I thought. I’ve only seen one or two in our house already. We may not be on the verge of being overrun. Plus those two that drowned in my paint bucket must mean we’re in even better shape, infestation-wise. Since then I’ve seen a couple of them a week inside the house. I’m not to the point where I’m killing them yet, but I have begun scowling at them energetically. “I don’t think these particular ladybugs are our friends,” I commented to Trash. Like me, she’s on the bubble. She realizes that we may have to deal harshly with them, but she’s not happy about it. Then I saw something chilling. Again, I was working at my computer at home. Next to the keyboard was a glass of ice water with a bendy straw in it. It was a glass that Trash had abandoned there, a fact that caused me great relief when movement from it caught my eye. A red-gold ladybug emerged from inside the straw and fluttered away. Normally this is the sort of thing you see in a horror movie; a creepy-crawly specimen emerges from or disappears into some wholly incongruous opening, usually while waves of non-union extra specimens course past in the background. I didn’t have the extras this time, but looking at this ballsy harbinger, it wasn’t hard to imagine them. I’m posting less lately, but if I stop posting entirely in the spring, it’s because the ladybugs will have carried me off. Keep on the lookout for me, okay? Call the Minnesota DNR if I vanish abruptly. Today’s best search phrase: “Public loogies.” Not with my tax dollars, you don’t. posted by M. Giant 3:57 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, October 27, 2003 They Won’t Miss You if You Don’t Go Away. Radio scripts for the show have a simple format. Each participant’s line is preceded by their initials; thus, Sue Scott is SS, Tim Russell is TR, Tom Keith is TK, and GK is my boss. If there’s a special character voice called for, then that’s specified in parentheses after the actor’s initials. Just in case you ever wonder if I’ve stopped appreciating my job, let me point out a few differences between it and my old job. At my old job, if I was very, very lucky, I might get to write something like “In order to calculate the aggregate average speed of answer for a range of clients, multiply each client’s number of calls by each clients ASA. Add up the sum of all of these calculations, and divide the final amount by the total number of calls overall.” Now I get to write things like this: TR (ODIN): Ow! My eye! It didn’t get on the show, but just getting paid to write things like that is the coolest thing about my job. Don’t think I don’t know how lucky I am. * * * The cats used to punish us whenever we went away for any length of time. We’d go on vacation for a week, or for a few days, or we’d go to work, and we wouldn’t hear the end of it for quite some time. We’d get home and be roundly ignored. You’d be amazed at how many ways a creature with a brain the size of a walnut can think of to walk away from you, all of them featuring a contemptuous display of anus. We’d come into a room and they’d walk away, and then they’d come back just so they could walk away again. The message was loud and clear. The message was “You wanna leave? Fine. I don’t need your neglectful ass anyway. Pardon me while I pee in your suitcase again.” I think this may have been the result of some kind of deep-seated insecurity on their part. Strat was a stray when he came to live with us, and Orca came from the pet store, so it’s understandable that it took some time for them to realize that their abandonment issues don’t have to apply to us. That time is over. Sunday, October 19. 8:30 p.m. I’m back from Austin. Trash is back from Milwaukee. Banana has come over to feed the cats in our absence, so one can not attribute to starvation the following reaction: “YOU’RE HOME! Let’s snuggle!” It’s nice that the cats are now secure enough with their place in the universe that they know we’re coming back. It’s just a question of when. And how much snuggling there’ll be to catch up on. “Look! Look! We’re over here! On the bed! Waiting for you! Look how cute we are! We’re already purring!” It’s encouraging to get such a clear signal that we’re good cat parents. When we’re gone, they not only notice, but they miss us. I mean, they’re cats and not dogs, so they’re not totally uncool about it. They don’t leap up to our chests and lick our faces as if we’ve just saved their lives. They’re just a lot more into the ear-scritching than normal. Strat, who’s normally satisfied with spending fifteen minutes at bedtime occupying a position on my chest behind the book I’m reading, prefers to welcome me home by running his motor for an hour or so on my neck, between my face and the book. Orca, who is more closely bonded with Trash, forcefully head-butts Trash’s hand, in a clear “LOVE ME! LOVE ME NOW!” demonstration. This is especially helpful when the hand in question is resting on her computer mouse. Yes, our cats love us. And I’m telling everyone so they can be embarrassed. It seems like the least they can expect after peeing in our luggage. Today’s best search phrase: “Velcrometer search phrase contest steal idea.” You talkin’ to me? Are you talkin’ to me??? posted by M. Giant 2:46 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, October 23, 2003 Going Down? I always think I want a window seat on the plane, and then I just end up driving myself crazy. It’s not because I’m claustrophobic. That’s not even an issue, especially if I’m in an exit row (although I wasn’t in an exit row Sunday night). It’s because I’m always trying to orient myself and figure out where I am by looking at the ground. Obviously that’s now going to work unless you know the ground in question fairly well as a result of having spent a fair amount of time on it, but that never stops me from trying. Overcast days aren’t an issue, obviously, but when you’re at thirty thousand feet and looking down at a few hundred square miles of the United States of Awesome (tm Invincible Girl), the desire to get a feel for which few hundred square miles I’m looking at can be overwhelming. However, as it turns out, the vast majority of American cities are sorely lacking in labels that are legible to the naked eye from six miles up. Someone should really get on this. I suppose I could carry-on a giant road atlas and try to orient myself using that. I could also go up and down the aisles introducing myself: “Hi. I’m a tremendous dork.” Besides, a person of my size feels self-conscious enough in an airplane seat, thanks very much, and the last thing I want is to make myself even more conspicuous by flipping through a book the size of all of the personal space that I paid hundreds of dollars to rent for a couple of hours. That’s why I like flying into Minneapolis, especially on a clear day. Flying in from Eau Claire on Friday to catch my Minneapolis-to-Austin flight (just so you know I haven’t gotten over the absurdity of that), I could look out and see the place where the St. Croix feeds into the Mississippi, and followed the river to the marina where my parents park their boat. I was on the ground five minutes later, having covered a distance that takes a half hour by car. So you can’t really blame me for my thought process on Sunday night during the descent back home. I caught sight of Interstate 35, the road we take between Minneapolis and Des Moines when we visit Deniece. If I’d had four days to get there, I could have taken it to Austin as well. The cities we pass through when returning home spooled beneath me in fast-forward mode: Owatonna, Faribault, Lakeville, Burnsville. Burnsville Shopping Center, eminently visible from the air at night, is twenty minutes from home. I looked at my watch: 7:30. Right on time for our scheduled arrival at 7:34. Problem is, we were going due north. As far as I know, the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport doesn’t have a runway that runs north-south. I conveniently forgot this fact. Perhaps the pilot did as well. Or perhaps he had originally planned to set the aircraft down in 35W’s northbound lane between the exits for 494 and 77th street and was dissuaded at the last moment by the control tower. Which is too bad, because that stretch of freeway is even closer to my house than the airport. In any case, my hopes of landing on time evaporated as the plane sharply banked left over the Minnesota River and meandered off over the western suburbs. Eden Prairie, Minnetonka, Plymouth, and Chanhassen slipped underneath us, and the lights of the metro area became more and more sparse. We were making a wide loop to come around and land on Runway 12, which meant we were going to have to come in from the northwest. It was at this point that I remembered that the airline I was flying on used to be called Northwest Orient, and the reason for dropping the second part of the name was becoming inconveniently apparent. It wouldn’t have bothered me, but I knew Trash would be circling around in front of the airport terminal. Which is always fun, because the stretch of road that passes by the entry doors is always crammed with people who are driving past it as slowly as possible, because even though they’re expecting their party to step out of there at any moment, they’re not allowed to stop unless something or someone is going in and out of their car, and there’s no point in going to short-term parking because they can’t meet people at the gate any more anyway, so there’s all this glacial, sneaky, going-just-slow-enough-to-not-get-flagged-by-airport-security driving right in front of the terminal building, and then everyone gets to the far end and has to come back around and it turns into a lap at Daytona. I would have called her on my cell phone, but apparently there are rules against that and for all I knew the woman sitting next to me flipping through the style magazines was an undercover air marshal who knew eight ways to kill me. So my wife spent a silly amount of time in that maddening circle. Thanks, September 11 hijackers! Finally the plane turned around, way the hell out over Rockford or some damn thing. Rockford is not a suburb. It’s not even an exurb. If the expansion of the metro area continues at its current rate, Rockford may become a sub-exurb in ten or fifteen years. It’s quite a bit further away than Burnsville, I can tell you that for damn sure. It’s like halfway to St. Cloud. So we came in over the western suburbs. I didn’t see my house from the air because it was dark, but I could see my neighborhood. The negative spaces that the lakes create in the latticework of streetlights is a dead giveaway. The last thing a passenger looking out of the left side of a plane coming in from the northwest sees before the wheels hit the ground is a church steeple at Cedar and Crosstown. It reads H O P E in huge white letters, one on top of the next. That was a nice thing to see the time we were coming back from Puerto Vallarta in the middle of a snowstorm and our pilot was riding the wind shears like a competitor at the X-Games and in literally five seconds we would either be on the ground safely or on the ground on fire. Sunday night, twenty minutes after I was scheduled to be off the plane, that sign was sheer mockery. I could have gotten home sooner if I’d jumped out of the plane over Burnsville Center. But like I said before, I wasn’t in an exit row. Live and learn, I guess. Today’s best search phrase: “Must you throw dirt on my face Merle Haggard.” Yeah, Merle! Must you? God. Asshole. posted by M. Giant 9:43 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, October 21, 2003 The Obligatory JournalCon Entry So, women and toilet seats, huh? What’s that about? Okay, the truth is I’m kind of dreading writing this, the entry about my first JournalCon. There were seven or eight shitloads of people there—many of whom I met, many of whom I didn’t. Some of whose journals I regularly read, more of whose I hadn’t. People who knew who I was, and many, many more people who didn’t know me from Sam Houston. Basically, it was a human blogroll. The reason I’ve been dreading writing and posting this entry is because it’s so easy for something like this to end in hurt feelings. There’s no way I’m going to remember everyone I met, and I hate to leave out mention of anyone. And, of course, there’s the whole name-dropping thing (more Damn Hell Ass Kings than I’ve ever seen in one place), which everyone else seems to handle just fine, but I’m likely to mention the name of someone I spotted across the room and completely space out on the name of the person I woke up on Sunday morning duct-taped to. Just as an example. Then there’s the karaoke thing. Whole can of worms there. I mean, being at a karaoke party that lacks a single dud performance seems like a good thing on the face of it, and it is, but then it comes time to write about it and nobody wants to read about four hours of karaoke without having been there, no matter how good it all was, and I’d never be able to do justice to the star-making performances we saw anyway. I do want to thank my partner on “Love Shack, ” who I totally dragooned into service. I’m still not name-dropping, but I will say I hope she didn’t mind singing with me as much as she minded seeing her apartment building burned down. And then there’s the whole thing where you say how totally awesome Person A was, how Person A made you feel all tingly inside and you’re on the verge of accepting Person A as your personal savior, and then have to turn around and say “Person B is, of course, also equally awesome,” even though Person B may in fact be incrementally more awesome or possibly even marginally less awesome. And is that really fair to either Person A, Person B, or Persons C through Omega? The easy thing to do, of course, would be to post pictures. I generally have poor luck with that, though, and my digital camera didn’t do anything the whole weekend but add weight to my luggage anyway. [Side note: Speaking of pictures, they had a really sensible policy. If people were allowed to take pictures of you, you put a green sticker on your badge. If you wanted people to ask first, you affixed a yellow sticker. A red sticker meant no pictures. The great thing about this is that you don’t necessarily have to worry about it at the time. Theoretically, you could just go ahead and take the picture—people probably object more to getting their pictures posted than getting them taken in the first place. So you get home, go through your pictures before you post, Photoshop all the red stickers to green, and paste ‘em up. Nothing simpler.] Anyway, I had a great time. The weekend flew by, as weekends without my wife tend not to do. And in the interest of fairness, I want to say to everyone last weekend, from people I spent hours with to people I only met in passing: all y’all suck and I hope you die. Today’s best search phrase: “Your face is tragic, tragic, hit you with 2%.” Ain’t that the truth. * * * Okay, I can’t do it. Shout outs to my peeps AB Chao and the Chairman, Allison, AltoidsAddict, Amanda, Angeline, booger, Brian, Cate, Charlie, Chiara, David, Dawn, Devota, Dreama, Emily, Gael, Greg, Gwen, Hannah Beth, Invincible Girl, Jeff Salomon, Jette, KarenD, Kate, Kim Holzer, Ladee Leroy, Lucky, Lyn and Bryan, Mare, Mary, Maxwell, mnvnjnsn, mo pie, Molly, Monty, Omar, Pineapple Girl, Rachel, Rebekah, Rob, Ryan, Sarah, Shannon, Sparkler, Stephen, Sundry, Thea, Tim, TranceJen, Tyger, Weetabix, all the people I’m forgetting or linking improperly, the Tim McGraw-looking bartender who sold me way more Shiner Bock than he should have without asking me to show him my own liquor license, and Sars for not getting mad at those of us who tandem-drunk-dialed her voicemail from the bar (as far as I know). And most importantly, my wife, Trash. It’s good to be home. Update: And also to Uncle Bob, for crumpling so satisfyingly when my beer bottle connected with his noggin. It was worth the spillage. posted by M. Giant 5:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, October 19, 2003 Blogging from 30,000 Feet. Sorta. What is it about flying to Austin from Minneapolis, anyway? Why do they have to make it so hard? As longtime readers may recall, in January Trash and I went to Austin by way of Rochester, Minnesota, back to Minneapolis, and thence to Memphis, Tennessee before ever seeing the Lone Star State. This time, my triumphant return to the Texas capitol for JournalCon required a preliminary road trip to Eau Claire, Wisconsin (accompanied by Trash, who would be driving on to Milwaukee to hang with CorpKitten and Chao), roughly a hundred miles from home, where I would again fly back to Minneapolis and thence to Austin-Bergstrom. No, I couldn’t just show up at the Minneapolis airport and get on the plane there. We tried that last time, and received for our pains a brief but highly unpleasant stay at Guantanamo. This itinerary is preferable in several ways, however. For instance, my initial flight was at 11:30 AM, instead of what our boys in the service call Oh-God hours, so I had a nice view of the ground below me as the 36-seat (counting flight crew) Buddy Holly Airlines puddle-jumper conveyed me back to my home city over the route I’d traveled the previous night – except six hundred feet higher and nearly ten miles per hour faster than my car. Then there was the double marathon hike from my arrival gate to the departure gate. I once again had to hoof it from one far corner of the terminal to the other, but at least I got to stay on the same side, as opposed to going kitty-corner. You wouldn’t think that Concourse B and Concourse G would be quite so far apart, if for instance you pictured the word “big” – look how close they are there. The word “brogan-destroying” would be more accurate. Now that I‘m on my final leg of my trip, waiting this long-hand for later posting, I can’t complain. I’m in an exit row, that I have my side of the aisle of all to myself, and no one is behind me so I can put my seat back without damning myself to hell. For a gentleman of my size, it’s the difference between flying to Austin in comfort and flying to Austin in a Fed-X envelope. I had my side of the row to myself on the Eau Claire-Minneapolis flight, too, but that doesn’t really count, because a) there was only 1 seat on my side of the row anyway, and b) on a soda can with wings, none of them are exit rows, unless, God-forbid, suddenly they all are. On the downside, there were a couple of interesting people on the plane last time we went to Austin. Deanna Carter rode with us from Minneapolis to Memphis. I considered having my picture taken with her just so I could post it to my site, just like Uncle Bob, but she was waylaid in the Memphis airport by a bunch of idiots who insisted on having their pictures taken with her. Jerks. Leave the poor woman alone. The bigger gap in the passenger manifest today is the one represented by the absence of my wife, Trash. It’s all I can do to not look over at the empty seat next to me and start crying like a toddler with a hangnail. But since there’s no stranger with a handily absorbent shoulder there I am restraining myself. I only hope the folks at JournalCon will be able to do the same. She’s the one they’re probably more excited to meet. Today’s best search phrase: “Peehole violation.” See, this is one of the problems with Google. They ignore terms like “of” and “with,” which sometimes makes it difficult to narrow the search to exactly what you want. I think the originator of the “peehole violation” search should write a strongly worded letter to Google to exactly that effect/ posted by M. Giant 10:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, October 16, 2003 We Have a Winner The search phrase contest is over. The winner is someone we’ll call B-Diddy, of Madison, Wisconsin, with the phrase "nightmarish ass fish revenge." She has chosen a fresh, crisp Velcrometer mousepad from the prize store, and she’ll receive it shortly after I get around to having it shipped. The additional prize of a link to the winner’s website does not apply here, as B-Diddy does not have one. If she was trying to railroad me into designing a site for her, she is destined for heartbreak. I like Madison. I have a weakness for college towns in general, having gone to a college that’s in a town. For me, Madison is like the prototype of a college town. I’d like Madison better if turning left there didn’t require graduate-level geometry skills, but every town has its quirks. For instance, on one visit to Madison, we were wandering up and down State Street when we noticed something going on at Peace Park (State Street. Peace Park. Makes us sound like characters from DC Comics). State Street, of course, is one of the two dozen or so streets that radiate from the State Capitol building like the spokes of an Escherian wheel. It’s lined with college-town establishments like used record stores, vintage clothing stores, ethnic restaurants, and so on. The storefronts are packed tightly together, except in one spot. This is Peace Park. At least, it’s the part of Peace Park that’s visible from the street. For all I know, it might open up into several acres of grassland behind the stores. Wouldn’t put it past Madison, with its sneaky dimensional anomalies. So, anyway. Peace Park. On this particular late winter Saturday afternoon, a group of crypto-hippies have set up a table and are giving away food. They have signs that say “FREE FOOD.” Fairly clear meaning there. There is also a large sign that reads “FOOD NOT BOMBS.” This is less clear. Has there been a rash of bomb-swallowings in southeastern Wisconsin? Are they competing with another group of youngsters somewhere across town who are giving away bombs? And, if so, how to I get to Famine Park? Trash and our friends (Chao and the Disqueen on this particular trip) wondered to each other what was going on. What did you have to do to get the free food? Sign up? Give your name and address? Prove financial need? And what were they getting out of it? As it turns out, the food was the result of regular production surpluses at a local plant. Rather than dumping everything at the bottom of Lake Mendota, they gave the overage to the crypto-hippies to distribute from Peace Park. But we didn’t know that at the time. We just figured something was up. This, of course, is ridiculous. At lunch across the street, I turned to my companions and said, “why must we assume that a good deed has bad motives? Why can we not give people the benefit of the doubt? These people are simply trying to improve other people’s lives, and that’s all there is to it.” An aura of goodwill spread over the table, and our collective faith in humanity was shored up. If you needed food, you took some food. It was that simple. So after lunch, we went across the street, knocked down a few single moms and creaky pensioners, and crammed as much food as we could fit into the back of our Escalade. That night we had a warm feeling in our hearts, ands a dinner so huge that the leftovers nearly filled the hotel dumpster. Thanks, crypto-hippies. Props are also due to DragonAttack, who a couple of weeks ago used the phrase "shaving cats for profit" and immediately disqualified herself to avoid any appearance of impropriety since we know each other and all. See? Classy! Just because the contest is over doesn't mean I'm abandoning the feature, of course. Don't believe me? Read on! Today’s best search phrase: “Importance of deserving your equipment and cleaning your weapon.” Google is no substitute for the Army, son. No matter what AltaVista tells you. posted by M. Giant 3:28 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, October 14, 2003 We have a winner for the search phrase contest! More info coming soon. posted by M. Giant 9:44 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Don’t Make Me Come Up There Now that my health insurance coverage has kicked in, I no longer spend my days off balanced at the top of a sixteen-foot ladder. No, instead I rented a 24-footer. First of all, can I just say how awesome it is to work Saturdays and then get the following Monday off? It rocks. Everything is open, but nobody is there. This is what I used to love about working nights, but without the crippling effect on my social life. I can do things like drive up to the corner hardware store and rent their one extension ladder for the afternoon without calling ahead, because, like, who’s going to be needing an extension ladder on a Monday who doesn’t already have one besides me? So the 24-foot ladder was enough to let me reach high enough to paint the top four feet of the house with four feet to spare, which was a small enough area that I had the thing back at the store within five hours. If you ever rent a ladder from the Bayer’s DoItBest Hardware store at 43rd and Upton, look for the gray paint smudges I left on it. So I was glad to have that done. Which only left a six-foot unpainted stripe between there and the top of the first floor. That was my project yesterday. It was another Monday off, so I hauled out the 16-footer and the painting supplies and finished up the trim. It was going to be nice to have this done, but while I was up there, I was thinking that the timing might not be ideal. It was looking like it might rain soon, for one thing. The sky wasn’t a particularly brilliant blue the entire time. And also, Trash was in Detroit. So if I were to fall off the ladder—sorry, experience some kind of “catastrophic ladder failure”—nobody would be around to take me to the hospital. I’d just lie brokenly in the shared driveway until the neighbors came home and ran over me. I did have the cordless phone in my pants pocket in the event of Trash calling from the road, so theoretically I’d have been able to call for help. But only if I landed in such a way as to protect the phone by breaking its fall with my body, which might result in more serious injuries. I mean, which is worse? Lying on a broken phone for six hours with two sprained ankles, or being able to immediately summon EMTs to attend to my shattered pelvis? And this is a decision I would have had to make on the fly. Literally. Then, leaning far over to one side with all of my weight on the outer arch of my left foot, it suddenly cramped up and I theoretically could have fallen off the ladder. Just like you hear about people doing. I suddenly gained a new respect for those people. Between that, and the weather, and my wife’s glaring inability to deal with possible emergencies by virtue of being in another time zone, I decided to leave the rest of the painting for another day. I didn’t want to mess up another brush anyway. Some other Monday, maybe. Hopefully an imminent one, as we don’t have many left when I’ll be able to work on the outside of the house without getting frozen to it. * * * Of course, I don’t have next Monday off because I’m not working this Saturday. Which I’m a little bitter about. Al Franken’s going to be on the show and I won’t get to meet him. All I get to do is write dialogue for him. My life sucks so much! No, it really doesn’t. Even aside from that. I’ll be in Austin, at JournalCon, with people whose cumulative fame and talent easily exceeds that of Mr. Franken. The pre-FOX-lawsuit Franken, at least. Perhaps you will be too, in which case we’ll probably meet. Chances of that are increased if you come to the discussions where I’m a panelist and watch me pretend that what I have to say, if anything, is relevant to the topic at hand. If you really see me struggling, feel free to raise your hand and say “Gosh, M. Giant, that is so relevant. Thanks for being so relevant!” Today’s best search phrase: “Nightmarish ass fish revenge.” And people say fraternity members don’t concentrate on their educations. posted by M. Giant 6:12 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, October 10, 2003 Sour Grapes So, I told you about the last time my pub quiz team took second place. In fact, I think I told you about all the other times my pub quiz team took second place, but this entry draws from the last time. As always, the second prize was a bottle of wine for each team member. Trash and I took home a bottle of red and a bottle of white. We drank one of them a few days later when we had company. The other one kind of stayed in my car. What, your car is pristine all the time? You bring everything into the house as soon as you get home or whatever? You’ve never driven around with week-old newspapers or month-old food containers in the back seat? Liar. I don’t believe you. And even if I do, it’s just going to be that much more upsetting for you when you get t-boned. So anyway. Stuff in the back of my car. And I drive a station wagon, as I may have mentioned in the past, so if people are going to be riding in the back, what typically happens is that I just fling stuff over the back seat and into the cargo area, where it can slide around to its heart’s content. It’s just that at some point I forgot that a bottle of wine was included in this particular load of stuff. Until I heard it rolling around back there and clanking solidly against something structural. And you wouldn’t want me reaching back for it when I’m driving, would you? Maybe I could have gotten it when I wasn’t driving, but it wasn’t clanking then. No, I didn’t break a bottle of wine in my car. What kind of idiot do you think I am? The bottle was intact. When I began to notice an odd odor in my car after it had been baking in the late summer sun all day, I investigated. And got rid of the month-old lunch I’d forgotten to eat. When the odd odor was there the next day, I investigated further. I can’t entirely explain what happened. Maybe the wine came to a boil in the car. Maybe its natural effervescence became uncontainable. Maybe the wine just wanted to escape. Whatever the case, amidst the muddle of papers and books in the cargo area of my car, the bottle was on one side and the cork was on the other. The bottle was bone-dry. And I’d been in inadvertent violation of open-container laws for God knew how long. Of course I was disappointed, having never tasted a drop of the stuff, but obviously its quality was far too high. This never would have happened with a screw-top. I had to throw away several books and most of the papers. And the bottle and the cork, of course. I’m not sure what to do about the upholstery yet; it still smells like a vineyard after a hot day. I did learn a valuable lesson, though. One is that a car is not a good place to store wine. The other is that when you’re dealing with gray upholstery, always choose white. Like I did. Today’s best search phrase: “WWW WHAT HAPEN ON SLIME TIME LIVE TODAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” Where to start…the stuttering, the shouting, the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some poor schmuck is way too invested in this question. I’m pretty sure I’ve never used the construction !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in this entire blog, and yet there I am at the top of the search list. And from now on, at the top of the list for every search that includes a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! posted by M. Giant 7:48 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, October 08, 2003 Tech Support My monitor at work started acting weird yesterday. Nothing major. It was just that none of the buttons on the front worked. Which wasn’t a tragedy, but it ahs built-in speakers that were locked into “mute” mode, which meant I couldn’t listen to any of last week’s show on the website. This morning, I figured I’d have another go at it. Maybe powering it down and back up would take care of it. All of the buttons were still non-functional, though, so that meant I had to actually unplug it and plug it back in. Done and done. When I sat down again, the buttons still didn’t work. And now the screen was flickering on and off. Two seconds on, one second totally black. Normally I can work around minor system glitches, but it occurred to me that this might be just a touch too distracting. Power up and power down again. This time the screen stayed on, but it was extremely dark. It was like sitting at a computer while wearing a welding mask. The reflection was brighter than the display. Normally, under such circumstances, I would adjust the brightness level, but the buttons on the front were still—wait for it—not working. Obviously this wasn’t going to work, so went around to the back of the monitor and tried again. This time there was a loud pop, a flash like a magnesium flare, and a torrent of glass shrapnel fired into my chair, which made me glad I wasn’t sitting in it at the time. Okay, that last thing didn’t happen, but this was on the verge of getting boring. I wandered down the hall to our Technical Director’s office to ask if there was a spare monitor lying around somewhere. He said there were some in the basement, but since he was cutting together a promo of considerable priority, he’d get back to me. In the meantime, I stole the monitor from the vacant office next to mine and plugged it in. That one has an anthill-shaped shadow at the bottom center of the screen that degaussing doesn’t eradicate, but at least I don’t have to read my documents in Braille any more. Also in the meantime, the person who does the travel itineraries when the show goes on tour had a catastrophic system crash. I wasn’t there, but apparently there was a horrible noise and a burnt smell and everything. So it’s possible that we may not be going anywhere. So we call the Help Desk. The Help Desk, mind you, is in Minnesota Public Radio headquarters in downtown St. Paul, which is one of many places where we are not. And anyway, they’re quite busy getting geared up for Pledge Week. I guess they’re in charge of setting up the phone bank, which I have to imagine is a pretty large and involved job. So they’ll send someone out here when they can to replace my monitor and maybe that other person’s hard drive and perhaps reconfigure a laptop that needs reconfiguring as long as they’re here, but nobody’s clear on when that’s going to be. Because Pledge Week is coming up. Which is fine. I can deal. No rush. I just wanted all you Minnesota Public Radio listeners to know that if Pledge Week actually goes ahead as scheduled, it won’t be for lack of trying on my part. Today’s best search phrase: “Combover hairstyle for women.” But why settle for just one? posted by M. Giant 2:43 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, October 06, 2003 Traffic, Jam There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie All of Me where Steve Martin runs into the club where he’s playing with his jazz band, grabs the guitar sitting on his chair, and sits down just in time to go into his solo. That always rang false to me, because I knew that would never happen. First of all, it’s ridiculous that his guitar would be all tuned up and ready to go. He’d have to plug it in, set up his amp, fiddle with his amp settings and whatnot. He’d have to warm up, if nothing else to relax his fingers from the claw-like state that crosstown traffic had no doubt put them in. And even setting all that aside, the band would never start a number in which the soloist is not yet present. It’s just absurd. This is what I was thinking about the other night when I had to dash from the show at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul to the band’s 7:30 gig at Betsy’s Back Porch in Minneapolis. Fortunately, the band did know in advance that I was working until 7:00. So my neighbors/bandmates were nice enough to load my 65-pound bass amp into their car with them and meet me there. All I had to bring was my bass. As it turned out, I had to make a quick stop at the office before going to the gig. So by the time I arrived, the band was all set up, just waiting for me. On stage. We’ve lived next door to Myrtle and Bub (not their real names) for ten years now. We’ve always gotten along really well, which is no mean feat when you’re talking about two families who share one driveway. When they told Trash they were looking for a new bass player for their band, I was skeptical; I’d just quit one band, and I wasn’t looking to join another right away. But then they gave me a copy of their demo CD to listen to, and I was in. As it turns out, this band plays out more than my last one did. Our first gig was Saturday, and our second one is this coming Saturday. We don’t have any lined up after that at the moment, but two gigs in two public places in eight days is still more exposure than my old band ever got. It would just be nice if the gigs weren’t immediately after I got off work. But this last one was, and so when I arrived at the coffee shop, Myrtle was already talking to the audience over her microphone. Stalling, I believe. I sprinted up to the stage area, whipped my bass out of its gig bag, sat on the stool they’d placed for me at stage left, tuned up as quickly as I could (which wasn’t all that quickly, since my bass had been in the car in an unheated parking ramp for seven hours), and finally signaled to Myrtle that I was ready. It’s a good thing they like my bass playing. I’d misplaced my copy of the set list somewhere along the way, so I was going to have to share a music stand with Bub. Which didn’t turn out to be an issue: Bub: “We’re starting with a different song.” Me. “Which one?” Bub: “This one.” Me: “How does that go again?” It’s a very good thing they like my bass playing. We got through both sets pretty well. I wasn’t thrilled with my performance; I’ve played much better in practice. Of course, at practice, we don’t have an audience. And getting there doesn’t require me to cross the Twin Cities; just a driveway. I’m hoping I’ll play better next week, since it’s a bigger room. This one will be easier to get to, though; it’s in St. Paul, which is where I’ll already be. On the other hand, we’re supposed to go on at 7:00, which is just about the time that my boss is saying my name from the stage at the Fitz. Obviously I’m going to see if they’d be willing to haul my bass amp over again. And maybe also my bass. Which I will ask them to plug in, tune, and place on my chair so I can dash in and grab it in time for my solo. Today’s best search phrase: “Woman shoots police with rubber bands.” You know, some people would opportunistically say that an incident like this means we should pass more rubber band laws. But I say we need to concentrate on enforcing the rubber band laws we already have. posted by M. Giant 6:15 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, October 02, 2003 Give me a Brake I got my car fixed today. Again. I think my car has taken up the hobby of getting on my nerves. More than before, I mean. Now that I no longer work a block away from a Saturn dealership, and now that my daily commute is almost the precise width of the city of Minneapolis, getting car repairs taken care of is increasingly inconvenient. This just as my car approaches its fifth birthday with more than sixty-thousand miles on it. It’s entering middle-age, and it doesn’t seem inclined to do so gracefully. It’s the brakes. Brakes are important, you know. Without them, I’ve gone through three pairs of shoes in the last month of having to stop by opening the door and dragging my feet on the pavement. I took half a day off my first week at the new job so I could drop it off with people who I figured would be able to get rid of that high-pitched “xxllxlxlxxxllxllxlx” sound every time I applied the brakes. They did that. Then, a week later, the rear brakes started going “eeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeee” every time I stopped, like somebody blowing over the mouth of a half-empty beer bottle. I took the car back so they could fix that, which they did. Then, a few weeks ago, the front brakes started making this “runk-runk-runk-runk” noise. I would have brought it back in a lot sooner, but now that Trash and I don’t carpool any more, there wasn’t as much incentive. But it was even getting to me; now that I’m an MPR employee and feel obligated to listen to people having intelligent conversations in the car rather than that rock & roll stuff the kids are listening to, it was difficult to turn the radio up high enough to drown out the racket. Finally I checked the warranty (twelve months/12,000 miles; whew) and brought it in again today. The thing is, I wanted to make sure they heard the “runk-runk” noise, which it only makes when the brakes are nice and warmed up. Maybe doing this on the morning after our first frost wasn’t the best timing on my part. For fifteen minutes I drove around the neighborhood, engineering a repetitively circuitous route that brought me to a stop sign at every corner (yes, you can do that around here. No wonder the home prices are so inflated). Then I brought it in and waited while they test-drove it and fixed it up. No brake noises now, but it’s still early. I’ve only driven to work and back once. I’ll keep you posted, unless I forget, which would mean that it’s too boring to keep you posted on anyway. Something not boring happened on the way home last night, though. I nearly flattened a cyclist. I was coming up to a stop sign—in a highly non-Janklovian manner, I hasten to point out—and this dude comes tearing around the corner straight at me. Head on, on the wrong side of the road. My foot was already on the brake pedal, so my tires chirped to a stop on the pavement immediately. But he was still coming, full throttle. He squeezed his brakes, which slowed him down only enough to give him time to steer around my now-stationary front bumper. Bonehead. I’m all for “sharing the road,” but “share” doesn’t mean “gimme.” If I hadn't been paying attention, that guy would have ended up in my lap. The last thing I need is to worry about some idiot in traction somewhere with the raised letters NRUTAS tattooed forcefully on his ass by contact with my car. Also, it’s a lot more inconvenient to get my car fixed these days. * * * Hey, if you’re in the Twin Cities this weekend and you’re looking for something to do after you’re done listening to my radio show, come check out my next-door neighbors’ band here. And not just because I’m playing bass for them. Today’s best search phrase: “Minnesota shit hurricane.” Okay, you know what? Some of the rap about Minnesota’s lousy weather is justified. But the weather here’s never gotten that bad. posted by M. 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